(ed: I decided to make this a new topic, instead of replying, so this is referring to my deposit of PTS to 'BeedUI', which froze my PTS well before the midnight GMT cutoff)
Personally, I've had enough of this BS. I emailed their support saying that I didn't give a crap about Bitshares, and that I wanted to withdraw my PTS. I'll see what happens. If I don't get a response, I'll pay some Chinese translation site to translate it for me and resend it.
I wanted to sell my PTS before midnight GMT, because I knew the price would drop a lot immediately after. No way in hell the Bitshares one received would be worth the loss from that. Sadly, I transferred my PTS to an exchange that had no clue as to what was going on.
That being said, I don't place 100% of the fault on the exchange, a lot lies with a lack of a clear, concise explanation of when this was actually taking place (at midnight GMT) & how long it would actually take for these Bitshares to become accessible (am I suppose to wait two weeks to be able to withdraw my PTS? lol). The whole 'AGS' rubbish essentially just further devalued the PTS that I was, well, paying to acquire (via energy costs, server rentals, etc).
It's also bizarre how a pool that I know is taking in a ton of money (ypool) can't seem to afford to pay a couple hundred a month for decent DDoS protection. While *constant* downtime assuredly nets less money, the large amounts of disconnects & reconnects just increases revenues for what has to be ... the greediest lot of people I've seen in the whole cryptocurrency community (as far as fees for pools and miners goes). On one pool, I've 'found' 11 blocks, but been awarded approx. 33% of what that would have made solo. I'm not usually one to have these conspiracy theories & it could very well just be that I've been very lucky, but in this case, well, I have my doubts.
I will leave my PTS/Bitshares node up at 5.9.24.81 for one more month, as I was actually compensated ~$40 for it in early January. The # of connections has dropped from an avg of 500-600 to ~200-250 these last several days, but it still consumes a decent amount of system resources, & bandwidth. Almost 3TB of upstream for this month (tons of new users downloading the entire blockchain in the last couple weeks), obv. this will be less going forward (if I had to guess, maybe 1TB for March). I think three months (plus the several months prior to that) is fair enough. Supposedly the DNS system is a lot more robust at picking up good nodes now, anyway.